Jordan has long been a geographical area where Creative Commons has looked to expand (you can read about our Jordan-specific jurisdiction work here) – as such, recent news about the promotion of CC, the public domain, and an increased spirit of sharing in Jordan is inspiring.

Two UK artists, Eileen Simpson and Ben White of the Open Music Archive, have been traveling throughout Jordan for the past 6 months, advocating for the establishment of a ‘CC Jordan’ as a means for local artists to “freely collaborate without harsh licensing restrictions”. To Simpson and White, CC licences would act as a means to promote authors, artists, filmmakers, and musicians across the country with Simpson stating, “if we weren’t allowed to refer back to previous works, to walk down the path of others, we would just be lost, and the creative community will be stifled.” From TechNewsWorld:

In an effort to highlight the importance of a diverse and vibrant public domain, Simpson and White spent the last six months attempting to sample old Jordanian films and musical works whose copyrights have expired, an experiment to work within restrictions imposed by international and local trademark and copyright laws.

[…]

Unable to find archived material that is now completely accessible in the public domain, they turned to the Jordan Academy of Music, which collected folk songs from the Kingdom for the 2002 celebration of Amman as Arab Cultural Capital. As the recordings are from the shared community and have no accredited author, the folk songs are a part of the public domain and therefore are not owned or controlled by anyone and are considered as “public property.”

Simpson and White plan on taking the songs and remixing them with local artists, updating the ballads and encouraging artists to explore the music further. “We all build on the creativity of others, and we should be able to build on others’ work in a fair manner,” Simpson told The Jordan Times […] “The whole concept passes on the spirit of sharing, which in a creative community is important to do,” she said, adding that legally allowing creative collaboration would curb intellectual property rights violations.

The article also touches on the amazing work of Abu-Ghazaleh Intellectual Property who we have been working with in an effort to port CC licences to Jordan and the rest of the Arab world.

Between twittering, blogging, founding copyfighting organizations, starting free culture chapters, and attending law school, frothing open source advocate Brian Rowe has moved his headquarters to CC’s San Francisco office to hone his legal research skillz. He will spend the summer crawling through the muck of works with multiple licenses for different resolutions, slicing through commercial vs. noncommercial classifications, and pontificating on the differences between linking and embedding.

Brian likes food, specifically cheese(the moldier the better), sushi, and bourbon. He plans to spend his unpaid internship (thx PILF Grant ^_^) crashing various tech parties to steal food and impersonate Robert Scoble. His hobbies include competitive chess, reading, Japanese Tea Ceremonies, and explaining to Microsoft employees the value of open access (he hails from Seattle, you see).

Brian’s aspirations are to finish law school, pass the bar, and then stick out his tongue at multi-million dollar Patent-Troll-defending job offers in favor of an ethical, and indeed saintly career defending freedom for information worldwide.

In a provocative interview with Cory Doctorow about his new book Little Brother, the non-satirical Onion A.V. club investigates the blogger cum sci-fi author’s motivations and strategies for convincing his publisher to simultaneously release his young adult book under CC and hardcover:

AVC: Was the Creative Commons release strategy a hard sell with Tor that first time out?

CD: No, it was totally trivial, in fact. I lucked out in two respects. My editor at Tor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, is super-geeky. We met on a BBS in the ’80s, and he runs his own Linux boxes; it just made a lot of sense for him. Furthermore, he’s also the senior editor at Tor, he runs the science-fiction and fantasy line at Tor, so he kind of doesn’t have to ask anyone when he wants to do this stuff.

…

Tom Doherty and Patrick both looked at this and said, “You know, electronic books represent the worst ratio of hours spent in meetings to dollars generated in income of anything we’ve ever tried at this press. Here’s something that’s relatively free—all we need to do is give it away, and we can see what people want to do with it. And if it works, great. And if it doesn’t work, well, we’ve learned. And if it’s inconclusive, we can try more, because we’re a big press, we’ve got lots and lots of books, and we can try lots of different things.” [emphasis added] And if it’s going to work for anyone, it’s going to work for me, because I’ve got such a good online presence. And you can see that they’re now trying this with writers who have a less prominent online presence, and they’re finding that by and large, it’s working pretty well for them.

Came across this awesome business that’s been building up traction in Japan called C-shirt — powered by media-wiki company Nota that leverages Creative Commons licensing in a pretty unconventional way. At first glance, it might seem like one of the innumerable t-shirt vendor sites out there — but it is, in fact, way, way cooler.

First, the conventional idea: users submit t-shirt designs which can be viewed online and ordered for printing. However, the twist is that since all the designs are placed under CC, Nota provides an interface with which to edit and reproduce these designs accordingly. Once you’ve remixed it to your liking, C-shirt will print and ship your unique version right to your door. Depending on the license, you can even repost your new design to the site.

Even better, the service is outfitted to work with some enabled mobile devices, so if you see a shirt you like on the street, you can scan the Quick Response (QR) code included on each design with your phone, which will capture a unique address where you can load and edit the t-shirt before getting it yourself.

Very slick. It’s mostly been active in Japan, but I’m hoping they start to make the crossover into the States. Thinking it’d be easy to expand this into a whole range of products — hats, lunchboxes, computers…

People make chairs more productively, hamburgers more productively, cars more productively, everything else in the world except medicines. — Aled Edwards, Director and CEO of the Structural Genomics Consortium (via CBC News Canada)

The drug discovery process is badly broken. Despite the scientific and technological advances that make genetic decoding commonplace, the time it takes to go from gene target to cure still stands at 17 years.

Science Commons’ mission is to speed the translation of basic research to useful discoveries, and we believe that a new approach is necessary to find more cures, faster. Today, we’re opening up the Health Commons, a project aimed at bringing the same efficiencies to human health that the network brought to commerce and culture.

The project, founded by Science Commons in collaboration with CommerceNet, CollabRX and the Public Library of Science (PLoS), is introduced in a 6-minute video presentation and white paper posted on the Science Commons website. The paper, Health Commons: Therapy Development in a Networked World [PDF], is co-authored by John Wilbanks, Vice President of Science at Creative Commons, and Marty Tenenbaum, an Internet commerce pioneer and founder of CommerceNet and CollabRX. […]

Jono Bacon, the Community Manager for Ubuntu and full-time metal head, recently announced a new musical project he is undertaking, SeveredFifth.

SeveredFifth is Jono’s new music project with the aims of seeing how far one musician can take the concept of Free (as in Freedom) music. Jono:

“Severed Fifth is really here to ask questions – both musically, and in terms of the new music economy.”

To accomplish this goal he is releasing his first album under the name SeveredFifth using a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license. This license is easy to understand to any member of the Open Source Software persuasion (the group with which Jono is most active in currently); you are free to make copies, redistribute, or modify it as long as you cite correct attribution and keep it under the same license. Jono:

“I chose that license because I wanted to secure some key rights for listeners of my music – rights that I feel are important as a listener. I think the choice of license is key to the aims of the project.”

Because Jono is empowering his fan base with the use of the CC Licenses, the community of listeners which form around the music are the ones who will improve the project the most. The initial work of creating publicity materials such as the website and photography has been done by some of Jono’s friends, but without the contributions of community members the project can not succeed.

“I think the key ingredient here is assembling a group of people who have a shared ethos – this is what we do in Free Software, and this is what I am doing with Severed Fifth – its incredible what is possible when the right minds come together.”

I encourage everyone who has a musical taste which leans towards metal to head on over to SeveredFifth and sign up for the newsletter and join the discussion; great things are sure to happen.